From the Editor’s Desk

We encounter it in every sphere of life - around us, in our own day to day life, much of it abounds – in the pages of our newspapers, in news footages from across the world, colours of this prevail. When we flip the pages of the newspapers and keep ourselves glued to stories therein, when we listen to the radio with rapt attention, or watch a movie on the coloured screen and react in ways strange and unexpected or expected – we are indeed in touch with this aspect of our being responding to the like in the sources of information at our disposal. When we retract ourselves from outer sources and flip the pages of our own being, and scrutinize the hours, the minutes and the seconds, interacting with our own self and with others, we meet up with this force again, perhaps more intimately, this force which seems to animate us in multitudinous ways. Welcome to the World of the Vital. This is the theme of this month’s issue of Newsletter - The Vital.

What is the vital? Sri Aurobindo enlightens us:

“Vital… is a thing of desires, impulses, force-pushes, emotions, sensations, seekings after life-fulfillments, possession and enjoyment; these are its functions and its nature…”

A useful exercise in understanding the vital force in us would be to take a step back and cheerfully place ourselves under the hand-lens and even the microscope of self-observation and catch all the instances in us of desires, vehemence, emotions, sense of possession, a running after sense satisfaction, enjoyment, and seek after the origin of these instincts or impulsions and their aim. The next step would be to contemplate on the need of the Vital in the general scheme of things. Who or what does the Vital serve? There must be nothing fundamentally despicable about Force, including the Vital force. Force is needed for life, for the drama of life and force is also needed to move forward, to progress, to evolve. It becomes clear that there is more to the Vital than meets the eye.

What is the use of the Vital in “ordinary life” and also a life less ordinary? Sri Aurobindo’s statement here and The Mother’s that follow is worth a ponder, “In the ordinary life, people accept the vital movements, anger, desire, greed, sex, etc. as natural, allowable and legitimate things, part of the human nature.” The Mother says, “In ordinary life it is something very useful but when one decides to do yoga, to find the Divine, it becomes a little cumbersome.” (‘Our Many Selves’, compiled by A S Dalal, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 2001).

Is the Vital like a horde of wild horses that can lead one astray, especially one who aspires for a higher life, but leaves his vital untamed, and ‘natural’, as it were?

Then there is the proposition of keeping the Vital subservient to another force other than itself, such as to have the Mental being rule over the Vital and strap over it the leathers of restraint, control and discipline. However, in a life that seeks after a higher principle, then mere restraint and control may prove detrimental to that spiritual growth upwards. What is demanded, in Sri Aurobindo’s words, however is a “…conquest and complete mastery of these things…” and therefore, not a suppression or an effacement of the vital force.

Let’s read on and discover the secrets of the Vital within ourselves, its many gradations and how it can be utilised for a movement towards the High and Mighty, The Divine. There is a need to know the Vital intimately, to know its strengths and use to which it can be rightfully put for a work of collaboration with the Divine.